Pulitzer Prize (Biography)

If, like me, you are an interested observer of both politics and history,
there are few more amusing endeavors to behold than the periodic "reconsideration"
of American Presidents. In recent years this practice has given us
some of the following rethinkings: Eisenhower, the secret geopolitical
mastermind; Kennedy the drug addled incompetent; LBJ the great, but tragic,
friend of blacks and the poor, consumed by a War he never wanted; Nixon,
the secret liberal, whose quest for world peace and big government was
derailed by the dark forces within himself; Carter the conservative, picking
up the Cold War gauntlet and rebuilding the American military; Reagan,
the amiable bumbler who nearly destroyed the American Economy with deficit
spending and was merely lucky enough to be in office when Gorbachev realized
what the Intellectual Left knew all along, that communism was doomed [see
Orrin's review of Way
Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
(2000)(Frances FitzGerald)]; and Bush, the secret liberal, who is
now understood to have saved the economy from Reagan's predations with
his bold tax hike and who is lionized for the Clean Water Act and the Handicapped
Rights bill. Since each of these assessments represents an
almost exact reversal of the accepted wisdom when the President in question
left office, we can easily imagine that ten years from now Clinton will
be understood to have merely inherited a booming economy and to have marked
time for eight years.

Of course, several of these new portraits do have an element, or more,
of truth in them and it is not surprising that once the partisan dust is
allowed to settle, a clearer image begins to emerge of each administration.
But each reversal also tends towards an Institutional Liberal mean--the
conservatives are either turned into liberals or demonized; the liberals
are rehabilitated. This is hardly surprising given the overwhelmingly
Left Wing bias of the intellectual class, who after all dominate academia,
but it should make us extremely suspicious of these caricatures.
David McCullough's Truman is an excellent case in point.

Perhaps no leader of a world power has ever taken the reigns at quite
such an advantageous time as did Harry S Truman. By 1944, when Roosevelt
finally died, the war with Germany was in it's final stages and the atomic
bomb was nearly ready, so the war with Japan was inevitably won.
Meanwhile, the Depression was convincingly over and the US Economy was
humming. Just three questions of any real moment faced the new President:

(1) What should the US do about the USSR?

(2) Could the country afford the massive Social Welfare State
that had been constructed to fight the Depression, but which had failed
miserably?

(3) Was American treatment of it's black population consistent
with national ideals?

The Truman presidency has to be judged, not on personality or temperament,
but on how he answered these three fundamental questions. Measured
by this standard, he gets a very mixed grade.

As regards the Soviet Union, there were basically three options: topple
them; ignore them; or contain them. The first option was a very real
possibility throughout the 1940s. The American Military machine was
massive, well trained, battle tested, and technologically superior, and,
with atomic weaponry, undefeatable. It is simply not possible to
make a coherent intellectual argument that it was important to defeat fascism,
but unimportant to defeat communism. By the time Truman took office,
even the normally dovish State Department was producing memos and analyses
that warned that the Soviet Union, in terms of both internal repression
and external ambitions, was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany.
The failure to destroy the Soviets at this moment of opportunity really
calls into question the entire War. After all, what difference did
it make to the Poles whether they were under the thumb of the Hun or the
Slav?

The second alternative is the one that normally strikes people as most
outrageous, but it has great merit. Suppose that we had simply packed
up and come home, telling Europe to deal with it's own mess. The
worst case scenario in terms of our own national security is that the Soviet
Union would have conquered all of Europe and we would have been faced once
again with an implacable enemy in control of the whole continent.
So what? We had coexisted with the Nazis without too much trouble
for a few years, up until the foolish Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
There would still have been no way for the Russians to actually threaten
the physical territory of the US. Conceivably we would have ended
up as an isolated bulwark of freedom. But the more likely scenario
is that the Soviets would have quickly found it impossible to control and
administer their new empire. There just could not have been enough
collaborators to augment Soviet armed forces and effectively repress large
and uniformly hostile native populations. Sure, you could cow the
French, but imagine trying to round up and disarm the remnants of the German
Army. It's impossible to imagine that a Soviet Union extending from
the Pacific to the Atlantic could have presented a plausible threat for
very long.

Suppose instead then that the Soviets had limited their territorial
ambition and stayed within an Iron Curtain, and had not had to undertake
exorbitant arms race military expenditures, since we were leaving them
alone, wouldn't this have allowed them to build a much stronger state and
economy? Here we get to the heart of one of the great questions of
the past century, do we believe in capitalism or no? Hardly anyone,
except the most unreconstructed Leftist, will honestly argue that the Reagan
defense buildup and policy of aiding rebels within Soviet spheres of influence
was not a precipitating influence on the final collapse of the Soviet regime.
But if you believe that communism is ultimately unworkable and that free-market
capitalism offers the only truly effective structure around which to build
a healthy industrial economy, then even left to their own devices, the
Soviets eventually would have imploded as a result of the inability of
communism to provide an acceptable standard of living. It might have
taken an extra thirty or fifty years, but it would have happened eventually.

The third alternative, containment, the one Truman chose, appears to
be the least desirable option whether measured by morality, effectiveness,
or cost. Having just fought a World War to conquer fascism, it is
inexplicable that the powers that be decided to leave communism untouched,
in fact to allow it to expand into the Eastern European territories they
held after the War. Was all that stuff about democracy vs. tyranny
just rhetoric to gin up patriotism? What conceivable purpose was
served by expending so much blood and wealth so that Eastern Europe could
be tyrannized by Stalin, instead of Hitler?

In terms of effectiveness and cost, the Cold War dragged on for forty
years while millions died or were sent to the Gulag. We were inevitably
drawn into idiotic wars like Korea and Vietnam by the internal logic of
containment. The policy made true national security irrelevant, we
were already committed to containing communist expansion everywhere.
Meanwhile, the US and Europe nearly bankrupted themselves trying to pay
for the Cold War and buy off domestic citizenries with enormous Social
Welfare programs. The post-Cold War boom and the end of such seemingly
intractable conflicts as those in South Africa, the Middle East, Central
America, and the Middle East, argue eloquently that the human costs of
the Cold War must be measured in terms of forty years of squandered economic
opportunity, societal stagnation and wasteful regional conflicts.
Now that we've finished congratulating ourselves for waging and winning
the Cold War, it's time to ask whether it was worth it in light of the
superior alternatives. I think the answer is simple : no.

The next big question facing the United States in 1944-5 concerned the
New Deal; with the Depression over, should the bureaucratic, expensive
and ineffective New Deal programs be retained and expanded? Actually,
I guess I didn't couch that question quite fairly, did I? But if
folks are going to be honest, it was apparent even at the time that the
enormous expansion of federal spending and the creation of the Welfare
state, while it may have alleviated some of the worst effects of
the Depression, had done nothing to get the economy going again [see Orrin's
review of Freedom from Fear
: The United States, 1929-1945 (1999) (David M. Kennedy)(Grade:
A)]. Economic health only began to be restored once the US
started supplying materiel to the combatants in the War.

In addition, between the expense of these social programs and the costs
of paying for the War, the US found itself with a staggering national debt,
some 125% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Republicans had been,
and would be, demonized for so long for opposing these programs that only
a Democratic President could hope to disband them and remain politically
viable. Here again we slip off into the realm of imaginary history,
but suppose for a moment that Truman had given a radio address calling
for the end of the temporary measures which had been passed to fight the
now departed Depression. Heck, we'll even let him keep Social Security.
Thus would have been avoided sixty years (and counting) of the maternal
state, gigantic deficits and increasing dependence on government largesse.
Combine the savings on domestic programs and the military with an economy
unencumbered by government spending, planning and overregulation and one
wonders where we might be economically by now had this course been followed.

In the event, Truman not only left the existing programs intact, he
proposed a myriad of new goodies. In particular, he repeatedly proposed
a system of National Health. At the time, many of the other industrialized
nations had such a program and it was just good liberal doctrine to support
such a thing for the US, so it's hard to blame Truman, a stalwart Party
man, too much for advocating one. But, thankfully, this was one program
that the Republicans, and Southern Democrats, managed to kill. Again,
we can only imagine how disastrous it would have been for the state of
medical knowledge and for the health of the American people and economy,
had the medical sector fallen under government control. Truman's
unwillingness to return the US to it's traditional small government, capitalist
traditions must be counted as a serious black mark on his record.

The final question, Civil Rights, is the one where Truman receives high
marks, perhaps the highest of any American President. Beyond being
the first President to address the NAACP, integrating the Armed Forces
and proposing major civil rights legislation (including an anti-lynching
law), he also proposed paying the claims of Japanese Americans, who had
disgracefully been interned by FDR during the War, and his support for
the newborn State of Israel redounds to his credit, particularly in a time
when anti-Semitism was still prevalent. It was on these issues that
his fundamental decency as a man, which McCullough repeatedly demonstrates
and which I don't doubt, was brought to bear on policy with good effect.

Even Truman's personality though is something of a two edged sword.
He was certainly a devoted family man and a loyal friend. The best
part of the book depicts his brave service in WWI, service which he could
easily have avoided, but instead eagerly sought. And his career in
Washington was really made by his chairmanship of a committee which looked
into how money was being wasted in the War effort. His willingness
to tackle this explosive issue, and to do so during wartime, reflects well
on him and speaks well of the American system. Also, the passion with which
he sought a second term and the systematic ruthlessness with which he took
the Republicans apart during that election year is a memorable example
of the determination to succeed which was perhaps the defining characteristic
of his personality. But the stubbornness and intensely personal tone
that he brought to politics and policy was not just a benefit, there were
many significant drawbacks.

Chief among these were his extreme partisanship and his capacity for
hatred. We have had several Presidents in the past century who nurtured
personal hatreds for their rivals and opponents, and each of them has committed
horrendous civil rights abuses. Wilson conducted the first Red Scare
and imprisoned Eugene V. Debs; FDR sent the Japanese Americans to concentration
camps, tried packing the Court, and really used subterfuge as a tool of
governance [see Orrin's review of No
Ordinary Time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : The Home Front in World
War II (Doris Kearns Goodwin)(C+)]; Nixon, well,
you know about Nixon [read Orrin's review of Silent
Coup: The Removal of a President (1991)(Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin)
(Grade:
C+) and The Right and the
Power (Leon Jaworski)(Grade: C)]; and, though the jury
is quite literally still out on Clinton, besides his personally criminal
behavior towards women, and things like siccing the IRS and FBI on people
like Billy Dale, there is the vastly underreported story of his rule by
executive fiat--this use of executive orders to achieve ends that Congress
would never allow is one of the most anti-democratic undertakings of any
President in our history. There is simply something dangerous about
these men who turn political disagreement into personal warfare.
They seem willing to trample every boundary of the civil society in order
to get back at their "enemies" and accomplish personal goals. This
confusion of their own good with the public good has resulted in some of
the gravest attacks on the constitution that we have ever withstood.

Truman, for his part, besides his ill considered desire to maintain
price and wage controls after the War, his senseless confrontations with
men like MacArthur and his genuinely contemptible willingness to misuse
the 1948 Congress and to run a patently false campaign against it, did
such things as create a Loyalty Oath program, not because he believed that
the government harbored subversives, but purely to get out from under the
political issue. However, the worst abuses he committed occurred
during several strikes, first his attempt to forcibly draft striking mine
workers into the military, then his seizure of the nation's Steelworks.
In the first instance, he seems to have been motivated by personal pique
when his union leader friends would not call off the mine strike.
In the second, he acted out of palpable hatred of the Steel magnates.
The specter of a President willing to deprive men of their liberty for
striking, or of their property for refusing to yield to strikers, smacks
of despotism and he was smacked down by the Courts and by members of his
own Party.

McCullough makes a convincing enough case, despite rising through the
Prendergast machine in Missouri and despite the various scandals that plagued
his Presidential administration, that Truman was not financially corrupt
himself. It does seem that Truman was above reproach on issues of
personal venality. But at the same time, he was loyal to the corrupt
men he surrounded himself with, to a degree which calls his judgment into
question. The fact that his political opponents sought to make hay
out of these scandals does not justify his stubborn refusal to deal with
the problems. Similarly, he seems to have refused to take the infiltration
of the US Government by Communist spies seriously, simply because he loathed
men like McCarthy. As post-Cold War revelations have made absolutely
clear, there was a significant penetration of the State Department, the
Manhattan Project and other departments and programs, several of which
led to concrete advances and advantages for the Soviet Union. Not
only did his stubborn refusal to take this matter seriously aid and abet
such spying. his willingness to turn the matter into a starkly partisan
issue was a significant contributor to the ugly divisions in American society
during the Cold War. A man like Joe McCarthy might never have risen
to such prominence had Truman been capable of accepting the fact that some
of the accused were actually spies.

Lastly we must consider two of Truman's most significant presidential
decisions, one unjustly controversial, the other somewhat dubiously canonized.
In recent years there has been a fair amount of breast beating and hair
pulling over the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Forget for a second
all of the emotional pleading and consider this question, facing the invasion
of the Japanese home islands and taking into consideration the horrific
toll in human life which conventional land warfare and aerial fire bombing
were already wreaking on the Japanese, name a single president who would
have so much as hesitated to drop the bomb. The whole controversy
is patently ridiculous. Truman did the responsible thing, he deserves
mild credit and no blame.

Which brings us to the Marshall Plan, source of almost infinite American
self-congratulation. As we've already discussed, the fear of Europe
falling under communist influence was vastly overblown in terms of it's
effect on US security. More importantly, we must ask what our money
bought. The nations of Europe did recover somewhat from the devastation
of WWII, though in comparison to the U.S. they must be said to have drastically
underperformed economically. This was due in large part to the fact
that most of the nations of Western Europe adopted or retained Socialism,
of varying degrees. American largesse was basically used to underwrite
economic systems which guaranteed economic stagnation and political repression,
though of a mildish sort. Europe and the world would probably have
been better off if Europeans had been forced to face the consequences of
their warlike ways and their unworkable pre-War economics. Instead,
it has taken until the past decade for nations like Britain, Sweden, and
others to come to grips with the fiasco of Socialism and to move towards
free market reforms. Finally, it can hardly be said that the aid
that we sent purchased much good well or turned the countries of Europe
into reliable allies. The French in particular frequently acted more
like enemies than friends and acted nearly as accomplices of the Soviet
Union. Stripped of fifty years of rhetorical excess and self-righteous
preening, the success of the Marshall Plan is clearly more problematic
than historians and politicians will admit.

How does McCullough handle all of these issues and how do they contribute
to his final assessment of Truman? Basically, he doesn't and they
don't. For McCullough it almost always suffices that Truman was a
good man and that he was trying hard, he seldom examines the eventual results
of his decisions except in totally conventional institutional terms.
In nearly every instance where two conflicting inferences can be drawn
about Truman's conduct, he give s Truman the benefit of the doubt.
For instance, late in the 1948 campaign, the results still very much in
doubt, Truman decided to send Fred Vinson, an old Democrat war-horse who
he had made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, over to Europe on a high
profile diplomatic mission to the Soviets. When George Marshall reacted
with vehement opposition to this naked politicization of the Court and
of Foreign Policy, Truman dropped the idea. McCullough treats this
as an instance of Truman's common sense winning out. He ignores the
fact that Marshall was a figure of such towering moral authority that Truman
could not possibly afford to alienate him, even risk him resigning, with
an election looming.

Similarly, he cuts Truman an awful lot of slack in regards to his decision
not to seek a third term. He portrays him as almost completely uninterested
and actively seeking someone else to run. He only barely acknowledges
that Truman was so unpopular, even within his own Party, that he lost the
New Hampshire primary to Estes Kefauver. There's a pretty significant
difference between willingly retiring and being stunningly rebuked by your
own Party. These instances are part of a general pattern which could
conceivably be an accurate reflection of Truman's unfailingly righteous
behavior, but more likely indicate that McCullough had made up his mind
about Truman before he ever started examining the facts and then just interpreted
the facts in light of his prejudice.

I recall reading Arianna Huffington's biography of the loathsome Pablo
Picasso several years ago. In her Introduction she mentions that
when she was considering the book she was told that McCullough was writing
one to. She duly contacted him, but he told her that he had decided
to drop the project because he found himself disliking his subject so thoroughly.
One would hardly suggest that a writer is obligated to continue with a
book about someone he can't stand, but it does raise questions about the
author's impartiality and the openmindedness of his approach.

The final result of all of this then is an immensely readable, but unfortunately
hagiographic, personal biography--as opposed to a political biography.
McCullough may well be right that Truman was one of the more decent men
ever to hold the office, but the case is only compelling as to his private
life. As a public figure, his actions were often less decent, sometimes
downright indecent, and the failure to take this seriously and to examine
fully the consequences of even the well meaning, but not necessarily effective,
big decisions that Truman made serves to weaken the book as a historical
document. It is a more satisfactory depiction of Truman the man,
but wholly inadequate as a guide to his Presidency and as a major attempt
to rethink what has generally been considered a failed Presidency, it fails
miserably.

Comments:

Wow, your entire "review" of this book consists of a sentence or two of you actually talking about the book, and several paragraphs worth of right-wing diatribe about your opinion of Truman. Don't quit your day job...